Forum:Proposed Merger with Chapel of Resonance Wiki
Proposed Merge with Chapel of Resonance Castlevania Wiki I've talked to the folks at the Chapel of Resonance (who maintain a separate Castlevania wiki called the Forbidden Library, though still usually referred to just as the Castlevania Wiki) about policies of one wiki using the other wiki's content, and we think it may be best for the two Castlevania wikis to merge into one. Essentially, all of the articles that are on this wiki would be transferred to the Chapel of Resonance wiki. I wanted to get your thoughts on this idea first before going through with it. Here are some things to consider: Their wiki has some very strong character pages as far as telling their stories go, which they have been building up for about a year. Our wiki does not concentrate quite so much on the story and would benefit from the work that they've done on them (some which started out as copies of what we had over here, but then expanded or improved upon or removed things that didn't fit their vision, but others that were started from scratch from the ground up). This wiki did start out with a good set of character profiles, but things haven't changed too much since the beginning and they haven't been "polished" too much lately. Their wiki completely lacks pages for most other things, which this wiki has in abundance, such as pages for bosses, enemies, levels, equipment and weapons, merchandise of all kinds, and Castlevania fandom. Merging the two wikis would result in a much more complete wiki. Also, merging the talents of the two wikis would benefit both wikis greatly. By the licensing of this wiki, they have the right to take any of our content and make whatever changes they want to it. I'm actually not sure if the same is true in reverse, but I expressed interested in the possibility of taking some of the content that they had over there, especially for pages we might not have a lot of detail on. Rather than have two Castlevania wikis borrowing from each other and developing pages along different paths, it'd be better to maintain a single wiki. Now, it would certainly be easier for them to move their materials here, than for us to move all our materials there. We have a lot more articles and pages for one thing. Here are a few benefits of moving our wiki there instead of vice versa: * Their wiki doesn't have ads on them, making it a lot easier on visitors who aren't editors and less annoying. * Moving it to the Chapel of Resonance would make it part of a larger web site that's been around for a while now and has a strong active community of Castlevania fans. It would be great to tap into that group and be associated with the other activities that the Chapel of Resonance has been doing, such as their YouTube channel, forum, essays, fan production, and interviews. Now, they knew about this wiki and could have decided to work on this wiki and improve it, but had decided to start a separate wiki in the first place. I imagine one reason for this may have been so that they didn't have to worry about rubbing anyone the wrong way on any massive scale changes they might have wanted to make and not worry about our editors changing their edits back. They probably wanted it to be something under their direct control as well and a part of their community. They've taken a few jabs at this wiki in the past, there may be some hard feelings? Well, I take anything like that as constructive criticism and don't disagree with some of the statements. As a chief architect of this wiki, I've taken pride in expanding the scope of the Castlevania Wiki to include anything related to Castlevania. The bulk of the work that I have done has been done on things I enjoy doing because I enjoy doing them. I do not really enjoy building up an existing page to meet a certain quality standard, or making pages follow a uniform format. I'm pretty hands off when it comes to that and would prefer to leave that task to other editors. I'm also really not much of a community organizer, if someone tells me that they would like to help and asks me what they could do to help the most, my answer is just to do what you enjoy doing. I am also not very good at asking other people for help in certain areas. I do think that joining forces with the folks over there would help this wiki meet a higher quality standard. If we do go ahead with the merger, I would become the administrator of the wiki at the Chapel of Resonance, while Nagumo and The Successor from the Chapel would have the roles of Steward and Bureaucrat respectively. If any other admins here would be interested in similar roles there, let me know. Anyone can become an editor on the Chapel wiki. You essentially create an account with the chapel forum, and then you can make modifications to the wiki. We do not have to worry too much about the amount of time it would take to transfer all of our files over there. There should be a way to do a bulk transfer. At this point, I'm not sure if this transfer would include the entire list of edits made to the wiki, along with the list of users who contributed (considering the list of users here and there are different), but I think some of that information would be transferred. It would take a little while to figure out how to do the merger of pages that exist on both wikis right now, such as many of the character pages. The background stories would follow what the Chapel has (if they're fully developed), but I'm not sure how we'll handle other character features, such as the Judgment quotes or fan materials. We'll have to work that out. Another type of page that they have a lot of is Sound Tracks. I'm guessing they initially copied what we had and then modified them, but am not sure. We'll have to merge the contents of those pages at any rate. Another thing that would need to be done is redo the front page on the Chapel's wiki to have better access to the bulk of new materials that will be heading the Chapels way. It'll be a shame to leave behind the new front interface that was added recently here, which was pretty good, with a great logo, scheme, and background image. I would like for this to be a full merge and basically change the front page here to be a pointer the wiki's new home. This will make it less confusing for Castlevania Wiki editors and reduce the amount of duplicate work that might be done over the two wikis. Of course, if we do end up going through with the merger, anyone could decide to "restart" the Wiki at Wikia. Anyways, please let me know your thoughts on this. If there is a general desire to not go through with the merge, we will continue to keep both wikis as separate entities. I thank everyone for their contributions to this wiki, and hope to see you at the new location. Thanks, --Reinhart77 20:54, March 26, 2010 (UTC) Links * Here's a link to the Chapel of Resonance's Castlevania Wiki: Forbidden Library * Here's a link to the discussion page on the Chapel's forum about the wiki, starting from where the merger was discussed: discussion * Here's a link to the main Chapel of Resonance web page: Chapel of Resonance Discussion (add your thoughts here) I'd say that this would be very helpful, not only in terms of combining our information, but also making it easier on the community to find more definitive Castlevania info on one website, instead of two. --Vhiel 01:01, March 27, 2010 (UTC) i'll let this page settle for about a week before starting to make any decisions. let's see what kind of opinions we have by April 2nd. one question anyone can answer is if the wiki did move to the Chapel, would you be inclined to create an account there and continue editing? of course, non-editors can give their input too, would you visit the Wiki in a different location?--Reinhart77 04:10, March 27, 2010 (UTC) really i want to move but we have worked to hard to move and have to create a account. and we won't have are edit count as high if any. I For one work good with not to many users and i'm still working on making it better so mega no.ZACH 06:10, March 27, 2010 (UTC) There is no problem. I do not discuss it.--Kiyuhito 09:07, March 27, 2010 (UTC) Well, this wiki is, say, half complete (no offense), and their wiki is half complete. It would be a large help to both wikis. My account name will still be the same over there, though. Shadowmaster 14:47, March 27, 2010 (UTC) One thing that we would lose would be support from Wikia. Pretty much all of the pages are written in pretty much the same scripting language, so they should transfer mostly okay. We would lose some of the "convenience things" that Wikia has provided, such as the rich text editor, or popup gallery images that they just created. Now I personally rarely use the Rich Text Editor (except when creating tables, where it is a life-saver), so I won't miss it too much. But I don't know if its something other editors would miss. The older embedded youtube videos will probably work fine, but the pages would probably need to be updated to get the ones added more recently with the insert video wizard working. So, one question is is which is better, having an ad-free wiki, or the special wikia features?--Reinhart77 16:20, March 27, 2010 (UTC) About account creation, it looks like they recently changed it so that anyone can edit a page without logging in, so you can make anonymous edits without creating an account. of course, if you want "credit" for your edits, you'll want to create an account and use it there. --Reinhart77 17:53, March 27, 2010 (UTC) Update - seems like anonymous editing is turned off at the moment (bot troubles?), but it can be turned on or off.--Reinhart77 19:12, March 27, 2010 (UTC) Ok, so it seems like most people don't mind. --Reinhart77 23:03, April 1, 2010 (UTC) I'm OK with it. -Chernabogue 11:12, April 2, 2010 (UTC) I'm OK with it too Bone Golem 19:31, April 8, 2010 (UTC) Merge in Process Hey, since most people are okay with the merge, the process will begin shortly.--Reinhart77 15:03, April 2, 2010 (UTC) Some of the merging process has started. I had expected it to be a script-driven mass move, but was mistaken. It looks like it will be a page by page slow process, estimated to take a month and a half or so to complete. I would say continue modifying pages here for now. You will be notified as pages that were here appear over there. So far, the other wiki has been focused mainly on merging the game pages. --Reinhart77 06:25, April 5, 2010 (UTC) Enemy Merge Almost Ready Hi. We're almost ready to start moving enemy pages over to the Resonance web site. But before we do merge a given page, we should tidy them up a bit. We should fill out the pages so that they're no longer stubs. Also, we're going to want to avoid large blank sections or long columns of info boxes on the right hand side. Any info boxes should be fully populated with the relevant data. Any help you can provide in updating these pages in preparation of their move would be great. You can also work on any other type of page here as you normally would. To help getting enemy pages ready, I've created an enemy table template that will display enemy information in a table format instead of an infobox format. To convert an existing infobox into an enemy table row, all you have to do is change the template's name from "Infobox Enemy" template to "Enemy Table Row". The parameters are all the same, so you don't need to change any of them. The "Enemy Table Row" template should be in between an "Enemy Table Begin" and "Enemy Table End" template. For an example of how to use the Enemy Table constructs, see the Cave Troll page. We haven't worked out all the standard formatting yet, but for now I would say that each enemy page that only appears in one game and only has one variant should use a single Infobox Enemy template and not use a generic enemy template. Any enemies that appear in more than one game or has a variant that we want to cover in the same page should not use Infobox Enemy template and should instead use the Enemy Table construct. They should also have a generic enemy template in the upper right corner. Also, if there isn't much text detail in the game specific headers for the enemy page or there are several virtually blank headers, we should remove the game-specific paragraphs altogether and move that information to the main paragraph. Alternatively, we could build up the text of the sections so that its worth having individual game sections. Once a page has been moved to the Chapel of Resonance Castlevania Wiki, a note at the top of the page will indicate that it has been moved and point to the new location. Templates facilitating moves haven't been completed yet, but once they are and the page standards have been worked out, we'll be able to move the pages. We'll go through this process for every type of page before moving any page. --Reinhart77 22:57, April 7, 2010 (UTC) I have created a page called Enemy Bibliography. This is used to document where some of the information for enemies comes from by adding a template at the bottom of an enemy page called "Enemy Footer". You can also go to this page to quickly find other web sites you can reference in order to fill out the enemy data tables.--Reinhart77 15:17, April 10, 2010 (UTC)